Brightcove, a company that has previously focused on providing an online video platform, has announced it is branching into the world of mobile app development and publishing.

A new service, expected to be fully available in the second half of 2011, will help clients release apps made for all the many devices that use them, from the diverse phones running Android, to iPhones, to tablets of varying sizes.

Called App Cloud, Brightcove's new content app platform will help customers port apps to devices of varying sizes and specifications based on a single template design. Localization has long been a pain point of mobile development, and Brightcove's solution aims to smooth the process for big-budget organizations. In its simplest form, the concept boils down to build it once for one device, and let Brightcove take care of making sure the app works on all other devices.

Read the full article here from PCMag.com

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday called on global business leaders to invest in new technologies to improve an education system he said is stuck in the Victorian age.

"In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him," Mr. Murdoch said in a speech at the e-G8 forum in Paris, a two-day digital conference leading up to the G8 Summit. "But not in education. Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution."

Mr. Murdoch's comments come as his own company joins an expanding group of corporate investors looking to invest in technology that helps teachers teach and students learn.

Late last year, News Corp. paid $360 million for 90% of Wireless Generation, a New York-based maker of software and other tools to help schools evaluate and monitor student performance and devise instruction accordingly. The acquisition came shortly after News Corp. announced the hiring of Joel Klein, former New York City Schools Chancellor, to oversee education initiatives.

Mr. Murdoch has described Wireless Generation as a gateway to a kindergarten-through-12th grade education market he says is worth about $500 billion a year in the U.S. alone. People familiar with News Corp.'s thinking have said the company, which also owns The Wall Street Journal, could make other smaller acquisitions but that Wireless Generation likely will be the foundation of its initiative.

On Tuesday, Mr. Murdoch made only a passing reference to his company's education efforts, though he outlined several key needs that News Corp.'s strategy seems designed to address. He said the key is "not a computer or tablet or some other device," but rather the "software that will engage students and help teach them concepts and learn to think for themselves."

Mr. Murdoch cited a partnership between Apple Inc. and two California schools in which the technology company created an app that gives students guided instruction on algebra, instant feedback on practice questions and access to hundreds of videos.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576343231249392742.html#ixzz1NaXzVxyT

Users of Yammer, a social networking service for enterprises, can now embed Yammer feeds and activity streams into just about any business application through the use of embed codes, the company announced today.

The feature functions similar to the way YouTube users embed videos on other websites. It’s a few lines of code that fit snugly into an HTML or JavaScript code. The site then calls out to Yammer to pick up any information about a specific feed and publishes it into a widget built into the website. The feed works both ways, too — any information entered into the widget is sent back to the main Yammer website.

Read more from full article here by VentureBeat.com

Over the past decade, we've heard a lot about the coming consumerization of information technology. Well, it's here. The Web, e-mail, mobile phones, automated teller machines, GPS navigators, supermarket self-checkouts, online banking, digital cameras, instant messaging, chat rooms, online shopping, airline e-tickets, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook--you name it. Every one of them puts large swaths of the population in direct, frequent contact with sophisticated IT systems and interfaces. And this is just the short list.

It's an overstatement to say "everyone's on Facebook" or "everyone has a smartphone"--but not by much. Something like 50 percent of the U.S. population is on Facebook and we're rapidly approaching the day when half the U.S. population of mobile-phone users has a smartphone. The U.S. isn't even the most techno-savvy country around. A similar "everyone has this" or "everyone knows how to do this" situation exists for many other technologies.

It's not just raw numbers. Several recent interactions I've observed convince me that we've passed the "tipping point" at which everyone has a pretty good chance of being, if not an expert at implementing IT, certainly an expert user. For example:

I was in a Comcast office this weekend, ordering a new Internet link. The connections now available are comparable to magic to anyone who grew up in the modem age. Forget a few megabits-per-second, which was the old "if only!" fairytale dream. Now, if you're standing in the right spot, you can get those wirelessly, even on a mobile phones. If you're connecting a fixed location, you can get 20, 50, or 100 Mbps. Such performance levels were, until very recently, available exclusively to commercial facilities--and were exceedingly expensive even for enterprise customers. Now they're in average homes and apartments, and don't cost more than a lot of cable TV bills. Multicore systems, HD displays, high-bandwidth networks, cloud computing--just about whatever it is, the very best IT has to offer is routinely available to individual consumers. Indeed, consumers now often get the latest innovations before enterprises, completely upsetting expectations established over multiple decades.

But technical capability isn't the truly astounding thing. Even more impressive are the changes I've witnessed in attitudes and expectations. The tech-savvy among us used to be a small group, of mainly younger folks, often themselves in some way involved in a technical field. Everyone else seemed at least vaguely anti-technology. But on Saturday I watched a number of customer service interactions in which Comcast offered a choice between sending a technician out or having the customer walk through a self-install process. Customers uniformly chose the self-install--even those well past retirement age. The retail interactions showed a moderate to high degree of technical familiarity from just about every customer. I chose the self-install process myself, and it couldn't have been easier. Everything is aligning toward a tech-savvy populace, and the populace is becoming routinely tech-savvy.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31114_3-20063375-258.html#ixzz1MvBmUt1J

One of the most exciting — and polarizing — aspects ofHTML5 is the specifications for HTML5 video. The promise of HTML5 is immense; no longer just a markup language, as robust applications can be built and deployed using the power of the browser.

One of the big promises of HTML5, at least for video, is that it will be possible to serve and play back hardware-accelerated video in the browser, on a smartphone or tablet, or in an embedded device, all without having to do lots of special coding.

Let’s look at some of the ways HTML5 is already influencing the future of online video, as well as some of the challenges that still exist.

Styling Video

Most content publishers serve video in HTML5 primarily to deliver a solid experience to users who are on devices that do not support Adobe’s Flash player. Although this is a valid (and increasingly popular) use case, there are additional advantages to using HTML5 video.

One of those advantages is the fact that because the <video> tag is just another HTML element, it can be styled with CSS3 and JavaScript.

This lets developers create special transformations, custom controls and other effects directly in the markup and stylesheet. Apple has a cool video effects demo using the Tron Legacy trailer and some mask properties in the WebKit rendering engine.

With Firefox 4, Mozilla has proven that it is embracing HTML5 in a big way. The Mozilla team released a set of video demos showcasing the power of HTML5 video when paired with CSS3 transforms in the lead-up to the official Firefox 4 release.

Read the full article here from Mashable